Every day I experience life in the world of healthcare IT, supporting 3000 doctors, 18000 faculty, and 3 million patients. In this blog I record my experiences with infrastructure, applications, policies, management, and governance as well as muse on such topics such as reducing our carbon footprint, standardizing data in healthcare, and living life to its fullest.

Tuesday, February 14, 2012

The Perfect EHR

I support over 3000 clinicians in heterogeneous sites of care - solo practitioners, small offices, multi-specialty facilities, community hospitals, academic medical centers, and large group practices.

In every location there is some level of dissatisfaction with their EHR. Complaints about usability, speed of documentation, training, performance, and personalization limitations are typical. Most interesting is that users believe the grass will be greener by selecting another EHR.

The bottom line from every product I've used and everyone I've spoken with is that there is no current "perfect" EHR. We're still very early in the EHR maturity lifecycle.

What is the perfect EHR? I've written about my best thinking, which has been incorporated into the BIDMC home built record, webOMR. (and has dissatisfied users too)

However, after listening to many "grass is greener" stories, I believe that what a provider perceives as a better EHR often represents trade offs in functionality. One EHR may have better prescribing functionality while another has better letters, another is more integrated and another has better support. The "best" EHRs, according to providers, varies by what is most important to that individual provider/practice, which may not be consistent with enterprise goals or the needs of an Accountable Care Organization.

My experience is that organizations which have given clinicians complete freedom of EHR choice now have an unintegrated melange of different products that make care standardization impossible.

There will always be dissatisfaction and a claim that something is better. However, I've never seen a change in product fix workflow and process issues. BIDMC's strategy is to do our best to ensure providers are educated and use their EHR optimally. I do not believe that there is a better choice than our current mix of built and bought products that makes sense for our pioneer ACO and individual providers within the organization.

3 comments:

I concur with your thoughts John. Having built and implemented many EMR/EHR solutions over the past 20 years across many countries, I haven't found a perfect EHR either! There are +ves and -ves as far as users are concerned and users love that culture of innovation and rapid response to their dynamic needs. Having said that EHRs are getting better as technology and adoption improves and EHR dev teams respond to the users needs.

It would be interesting to hear how EHR procurement goes when it's been narrowed to a few options. Do hospitals user-test these records in non-live settings with their staff to get initial impressions and usability metrics? If there's literature out there that I am clearly not aware of, I'd appreciate a pointer.

Hi John, question....you say "pick an EHR for your enterprise that meets your strategic goals." What are your strategic goals for 2012? And what obstacles or pain points have you or will you encounter in reaching these goals? Feel free to email if you would rather amygduncan@gmail.com. I would greatly appreciate your feedback and I enjoy reading your blog! Thanks!